Episode 3: Winning a Battle, Losing the War

Notable plot points:

The sad truth is that I tried and failed to watch this miserable episode three times. A couple of times I fell asleep and once I got so angry that I left the room, went to another room with another TV, and turned on the movie “The Hangover.” Embarrassing, I know.

 
I have finally, officially, watched the entire episode completely. The complicated plot opens with a dreadful sequence of Meredith Grey’s new surgical intern roommates arguing and chasing each other around her mother’s house, but quickly transitions to a sequence involving the plot driver, Seattle’s annual “Dead Baby Bicycle Race.” DBBR is a real thing, although I doubt there are quite as many injuries as this episode would indicate.

Later, George is propositioned by a gay man who is dying of “liver cancer” (How very Roy Cohn of him, although it would seem that this character actually does have liver cancer given that a key plot point is his need for a transplant). Painfully, George must tell the man that he is not interested in the proposition for many reasons, one of which is the fact that he is not gay. When George confides his conundrum to his co-interns, all seem to be surprised by claim of heterosexuality.

The irony here, of course, is that the actor who plays George, T.R. Knight, was outed in 2006 when his costars, Dempsey and Washington, got into an on-set argument during which Washington told Dempsey, “I’m not your little f-----t, like TR Knight.” (That sort of behavior can only be called classy, and this was just the beginning of trouble on the Grey’s Anatomy set for Washington). As a result of the outing, Knight subsequently announced his orientation via People magazine.

As a side note, I was once propositioned by a patient, a camo-clad lesbian bearing tickets to an Ozzie Osbourne concert, and despite the fact that it did not precipitate a crisis about my sexual identity, I did find it extremely stressful to have to try to politely refuse the offer.I feel your pain, George, is all I'm saying.

Meanwhile, Dr. McDreamy really may be sexually harassing Dr. Meredith Grey. I mean, she definitely has a case if she chooses to bring it up with HR or a lawyer. He is her boss, but keeps asking her out, sometimes in inappropriate settings, like the locker room. Creepy.

All this is gravy, however, because the majority of the plot involves the interns scheming to harvest the organs of a brain-dead man, and this is the plot point that made me practically unable to watch the episode. The introduction to this patient is Izzie announcing “He could wake up because miracles happen!” and I immediately became afraid that this “brain-dead” patient would actually wake up, giving families of brain-injured patients everywhere false hope.

Thank goodness this was not the case, but it wasn’t much better given that the episode made the whole process of organ donation look something like “Weekend at Bernies.” The stuff they do to the poor, mostly-dead patient is only inches short of putting him on water skis.

 

Yep. This pretty much sums it up.

My other issue: The number of times the interns referred to the donation as “The Harvest” made me feel like I was watching M. Night Shyamalan at his worst: “The Village,” “The Happening”and now, "The Harvest."
 
Best lines
“I hate Chinese food!”

and

"I'm going to become a lesbian."

I don’t actually hate all Chinese food (how can a billion people be wrong?), but cheap Americanized Chinese take-out really is the worst. As for the lesbian comment, I usually am annoyed by straight women talking about how they wish they were lesbians (I can't take them seriously. Whatever.), but Sandra Oh! can say this all she wants and I'll never tire of hearing it.


Valuable Lessons I Learned
I once again realized that this show really is missing a key ingredient of intern life: pager servitude. We never see the Grey's interns get paged or return calls only to sit on hold. I can't even talk to my interns because they're always on the phone, or on hold, with someone. 

But then the surgeons canceled my patient's surgery but somehow never called me to tell me they had decided this (and she had been without food for 24 hours), and I realized that real surgeons do have something in common with the characters on this show. They don't use the phone nearly enough.